‘Punjabi by nature’, and therefore, blunt

From reconciling outdated censorship rules with the Twitter age to his own full-blooded and, as some would say, verbose style of defending the Congress — information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari confidently fielded a broad brush of questions during an Unplugged at HT session on Tuesday.

“(I’m) Punjabi by nature,” Tewari said when asked to comment on his razor-sharp attacks on the Opposition as the erstwhile Congress spokesperson.

Son of a professor assassinated during Punjab’s Sikh insurgency and a dentist-mother, Tewari, a lawyer by training, did not disappoint an audience eager to know if he would change his ministry’s stance on censorship in the digital age, as expected of a minister who, at 47, is relatively young.

“The government will take its time to come to terms with social media,” he said, adding that it preferred “self-regulation” by media entities to hardnosed government checks.

“Right to offend is OK, but there must be a remedy for it. Society must ultimately find its own comfort level.”